Really great piece!  Gopnick has done a nice job of summarizing NT criticism as well as the problem/fun of “the historical Jesus.”  He gets some of the facts wrong and perhaps oversimplifies some debated material, but in a popular publication it is nice to see anything beyond N. T. Wright dribble.

It’s a rainy Sunday and nothing could more epitomize rest.  I’m so declined on the couch sipping my tea that some might say I’m lying down. I prefer to imagine myself as a Roman aristocrat in his triclinium.  Why though do I have the luxury of a lazy Sunday? Almost everyone knows why Sunday is the day of rest; most know that labor activists in the nineteenth century agitated for the five-day workweek.  But how exactly did the Jewish Sabbath(Saturday) end up as the legal day of rest for everyone?  I did some investigating.  

 
Well let’s start in principio, so to speak.  ”In the beginning, God created_____okay, fill in the blanks here____and then on the seventh day, he rested.”  Genesis (Hebrew Bereishit) narrates this first week in chapters one and two (it actually tells it twice…)and thus explains the origin of the Lord’s day, or Sabbath, in the Israelite/Jewish tradition.  Sabbath stems from the Hebrew verb for ceasing, i. e., ceasing work, so any day or period of time in which one rests in honor of God is “Sabbath.”  There are Sabbath weeks, years, etc. Now, of course, the seventh day for Jews is Saturday as God started on Sunday (Rishon)—- Jews had a seven-day week already, but in the the Hellenistic period  the Jews equated their days to the Greek seven-day week.  Thus, Rishon (day #1) became equivalent to ἡμέρα Σελήνης (Hemera Selenas), or “Day of the Moon,” and thus Sabbath became equivalent to ἡμέρα Κρόνου (Hemera Kronou), or “Day of Saturn.”   

Here, we need to jump to the calendar as it relates to one Jew in particular, Jesus of Nazareth.  Despite some discrepancies or confusion among the Gospels—-I’m not even going here, but let’s just say it’s a little unclear—-early Christians come to the consensus that Jesus was crucified on Friday and that he rose on Sunday.   Alright, we are cooking with gas.  The first Christians were Jews, but Jews living in a Hellenized part of the Roman empire, so they understood that Sabbath came on Greek Saturday.  Their Lord had been resurrected from the dead on Sunday though.  ”Hmmm, on which day should we celebrate?,”  They asked themselves.  Let’s just agree, despite some problematizing of the “partitioning of Judaism and Christianity” à la Daniel Boyarin, that eventually Christians came to think of Sunday as their Sabbath, or day of rest.  

Moving right along, there are some persecutions, some martyrs, and eventually Constantine the Great legalizes Christianity with Edict of Milan in 313.  Hooray, now Christians can openly not work on Sunday without worrying about arousing suspicion.  Despite the version of the Constantine story as told by Eusebius, Constantine did not stop patronizing other gods.  In fact, he kept Sol Invictus (the unconquerable Sun) as his patron god and the god with which he is identified on public insignias. In 321, Constantine declared Dies Solis, or the day in honor of his patron god, as the official Roman day of rest.  No courts, no government work, and no shops or markets.  Of course, this also happened to be day of rest for his other supporters, the Christians  (Debate can go on endlessly about Constantine’s intentions or motives with such policies). This practice was kept after the empire was Christianitized and even after it fell—-from the early middle ages to the modern! 

Thank heavens, though,  for those wonderful nineteenth-century troublemakers who got us Saturday too!

I spent the weekend travelling across the country, leaving the negotium of  North Carolina for a weekend of otium by the bay.  No, I did not find myself sipping vino a Napoli, but the San Francisco bay is a close second (actually, it was Mimosas in Dolores Park).  I may have been physically in California, but in a more abstract sense, I was in a different state: I spent the weekend nestled in the old blanket of friendship—for, isn’t that what friendship is, a familiar cloth tattered and worn from all the memories, but nevertheless comforting and strangely fresh? 

I set out to write a piece on travel, specifically how travel would have been and would have been conceived of differently in the ancient world.  This seemed apropos on the plane ride over, but reflecting back on the weekend the traveling seems much more a means to an end, not the focus of my energies.  But, of course, itineraries are general outlines, not strict guidelines, so let’s wander for a bit.

 I crossed the country to see my old friends and brothers, Lenny and Owen, for a weekend of festivities accompanying the Bay to Breakers marathon. For the sake of probity and posterity,  I’ll leave the Bacchanalian parts of the weekend out, but I can’t say enough how great it was to have even a few days with old friends.  I have kept up with both of them, more or less.  I’ve seen them both multiple times since graduation and try to drop them both lines—but truly, nothing compares to an extended amount of time in their physical presence.  And for Owen, as he lives in San Fran, I was able to see him in situ, so to speak, that is, in his new environment.  I met his friends, observed his new stomping grounds—in some ways, I got to see old, anew.  So this was a journey or a pilgrimage with old friends—Cicero hopping to the provinces just saying “Salve!”

My time among old friends forced me to contemplate the other long-term, long-distance relationships in my life.  It also made think of how they’d have been maintained in the age of Alexander or Augustine.  In some ways, imagining an epistolary relationship is easy for moderns  and in others, it’s mind-boggling.  Let me explain:  I, like many net-savvy Facebookers and Googlers, regularly communicate with friends, or even strangers, through online and digital media.  This morning, I received a skype phone call from my friend in London, while I chatted away on Facebook to another compatriot slumming it in the UK.  They both reside in London for the moment and probably have less than ten physical miles between them, but they don’t know each other—probably never will.  (Now, of course, they have loads in common; they both attended school in North Carolina, both live in London and both have had the luxury/duty of accompanying me as a formal date.  Perhaps a digital introduction is warranted?) Needless to say, like our ancient counterparts (well the literate, at least), we our forced to maintain friendships (even make them) through letters.  IM’s, e-mails and Gchats differ from epistolary relationships, in that there is immediate responsiveness.  With video chats, there is even more responsiveness.  You see the lines of your friend’s face curl around as they smile at your joke or they stare blankly on—wit lost to cyberland.   No months waiting for news on vellum or paper!  No lingering questions burning in anticipation.  What did you mean?  I don’t understand.  PFFF!  Instant answer.  Gone is the painstaking writing, checking every detail, every line to convey perfectly your points, as it might take months to hear back.  Moreover, there is no more zeal for interrogating each line of a friend’s crafted response, studying and memorizing the precious jewels of sentiment. 

Perhaps it was never this romantic.  Augustine, things are well—Alypius.  Or maybe it was not so meaningful.  Marc Antony, way too drunk last night, killed several Gauls, miss you, buddy—C. I. Caesar.  Many surely knew their letters might be published.  But I can’t help but feel that in this age of digital expediency, we speak more often, but less deeply

I’ve been thinking a lot about the soul lately, not so much about my soul, but about the staying power of the concept.  More or less, all the religions from the axial age onwards(basically from the age of Plato, Buddha and Jesus) have some idea of a self that is not corporeal, but nevertheless a part of person.  This part, really essence, in most traditions exists on after shedding its mortal coil. Despite the best efforts of modern psychology and biology, popular culture retains the idea that there is some indelible and non-physical force, i. e., there are souls and thus ghosts.  This made me think of a piece I wrote for my office blog a while back, entitled “The Ghosts of Duke’s Past”: 

I am a child of the 80’s–and the Ghostbusters franchise was my wet-nurse.  The movies, the cartoons, the toy proton-packs, all of it.  Recently, I came across a line from Ghostbusters II that has not stopped resonating in my mind:  “You might want to check those Duke University mean averaging studies on controlled psychokinesis.”  Was this a sign? An omen?  How had I never caught that my Alma Mater was mentioned?  Luckily, author and NPR correspondent Stacy Horn has helped me make sense of my haunting questions with her new book Unbelievable: Investigations into Ghosts, Poltergeists, Telepathy and other Unseen Phenomena from the Duke Parapsychology Laboratory. It not only made sense of the reference (it was a study of human thought on a random-number generator) but also gave me a sense of Duke’s values and history.

The book centers on the eccentric botanist-turned-parapsychologist J.B. Rhine who taught here from 1927-65.  From an early age, Rhine had nurtured an interest in the human mind and at Duke that interest spawned almost thirty years of studying the “psychic power” of the human mind.  You see, as Horn explains, Rhine didn’t believe in ghosts; rather, he believed that the human mind had more potential and power than standard psychology gave us credit for.  So ghosts and mediums were not channeled souls of the dead, but some form of communication or “extra-sensory perception.”  Likewise hauntings were not the work of the poltergeists but simply the telekinesis of homes’ inhabitants.

Really I am just as incredulous and skeptical as the next person.  But I think there are some lessons here. In 1927, when Rhine came to Duke to study the paranormal, Duke was only three years into its academic endeavor.   President Few had been swayed by a Rhine, a recent PhD from UChicago(also a young university) to create a lab investigating the mysteries of the human mind, one similar to the one Stanford (another young university) had already created.  Few wanted to be on the cutting edge, and Rhine with his bold proposal might enable that.

So Rhine received Few’s blessings, money and space in the East Duke building to begin his investigations into ESP.  Here in Horn’s book things get weird-at least for any Dukie.   Horn recounts hundreds of students waiting in line on West Campus to be tested for telepathy while the more timid students were clandestinely studied in their Few quad rooms (obviously it was not Few quad then).  A few students seemed promising, so he developed more intricate ways to test them.   Duke Psychology professor Karl Zener designed for him simple geometric cards that could be “visualized” telepathically” more easily than a standard 52-deck (These cards make an appearance in Ghostbusters I).  Then Rhine began testing the effect of distance on telepathy by placing his subjects across quads (see picture).

The book is littered with names and nooks that any Dukie would know.  You run into president Terry Sanford and an unnamed critic (biology professor Peter Klopfer); you move from Rhine’s East Duke lab to the Perkins Library, from his Psych building office, to the Duke Parapsychology Lab off of East Campus (now the Newman Catholic Student Center).  Somewhere across the absolutely phantasmagorical and the nostalgic landscape of this book, you find a stubbornly optimistic man with the Sisyphean task of convincing both the world and himself.

In the course of his thousands of individual interviews and studies, Rhine attracted many notable scientists, much press attention,  and not to mention research dollars to the university.  With visits from authors Timothy Leary and Upton Sinclair, psychologist Carl Jung, and lengthy correspondents with Albert Einstein, Rhine helped placed Duke and Durham on the map-for better or worse.  Until his death, he labored to prove the untapped potential of the human mind.  Despite his failings, what could epitomize Duke more:  zeal for bold and daring ideas, a commitment to detailed research, and faith in the power and possibility of the human mind.

I recently ran across an interesting news article about Liberty University’s seminary dean in The Huffington Post’s college section—the story brought together two topics which I love to research and occasionally skewer, namely religion and higher education, so I couldn’t resist reading about the scandal in Lynchburg, Va. Here’s the gist:

Everyone loves a good conversion story and so did the administration of Liberty University, when it came to selecting Muslim-convert Ergun Caner as dean of their Baptist seminary.  Ergun Caner claimed to have converted from Islam to evangelical Christianity sometime during his high school years in Ohio: from Sunni religion to Sunbelt faith, so to speak.  Perhaps he heard a calling on the road to Cincinnati!  The story of this wayward lamb finding his way propelled his ministries as well as his ascendency to a deanship at rapidly growing faith-based institution, founded by Jerry Fallwel no less.  ChristianityToday, though, recently  uncovered evidence that Dr. Caner had embellished his conversion story and misrepresented his biography.  The evangelical blog  contends that he lied about “growing up in Turkey, when he actually grew up in Ohio, being raised in a devout Muslim home, rather than a nominal one, having been involved in Islamic jihad and having debated dozens of Muslims about the Islamic faith.”

Since I am not Baptist or affiliated with Liberty, I am not overly concerned with what this shepherd did before he took up the pulpit or what he tells his flock about his adolescence.  I am, however, fascinated by the continued allure and power of the conversion story. Why would someone lie about  their former religious devotion?  Paul claims in Galatians  to have “persecuted the church of God and tried to destroy it,” which made his zeal for Jesus and dedication to his message all the more poignant.  Paul’s repentance and his blinding on the road to Damascus becomes the archetypal conversion, but the conversion topos doesn’t reach its apex until Augustine’s supposed Confession circa 397 c.e.  

In the African bishop’s magnum opus, Augustine crafts his spiritual autobiography as an extended confession to God for his past sins.  He brings in a rich cast of characters to explain how he wandered in philosophical angst and sexual promiscuity until a heart-wrenching, theophany in a Milanese garden: he hears a voice, “Tolle, Lege, get up and Read”; he runs to Bible, opens the first page he finds, and is amazed to find a verse in Romans that speaks to his conditions.  Miraculously, he seeks baptism from that point on.  Like Caner, though, there is evidence that Augustine embellished “his life” before this revelation, Augustine’s pious mother Monica had tried to bring him to the Christian faith throughout his life, but he was too busy with women and philosophy.  Then Augustine fell into a trendy new religion/heretical version of Christianity Manicheanism, which held sway over him for nine years according to Augustine.  By his own accounts, though, Augustine stayed with the Manichean community for eleven years—apparently for two years, he was present in body, but not mind or spirit.  Augustine also worked in a Christian Roman court, so assuredly he had to at least feign some affiliation with Christianity; and lastly, he was married through most of his life and among the sex-fearing Manicheans, so one might doubt the degree of his obsession with “concupiscence” or horniness.  But which makes a more compelling character:  a recalcitrant, sex-crazed heretic who finds his way or a skeptical man of typical passions?  Which one draws the distinction between sinner and saint more clearly?

I can’t help but think that Dr. Caner had read Augustine’s Confessions or at least was influenced by the topos of zealous conversion.  How easy it would be to shape a parallel conversion story for a  Muslim from a distant, heretical land (Turkey/Sweden) whose mother is named Monica (that’s her name)! Augustine fought rumors about his past for most of his life, so perhaps Dr. Caner should consider this the first of many attacks.  But things worked out pretty well for Augustine and his nachleben, so don’t worry Ergun…